Teach young people to respect authority
We need more police officers but we also need a cultural shift in the way our society views them
Few Daily Telegraph readers will disagree with Kwasi Kwarteng that the past 20 years have seen a calamitous decline in the respect shown by the public towards figures of authority. Many will have been nodding their heads, too, when the minister called at the weekend for a return “to the levels of deference that we saw in the past”. He cited the Prime Minister’s pledge to put an extra 20,000 police officers on the streets over the next three years as a “good place to start”. And after the shocking death of a 28-year-old PC in Berkshire last week, it is clear that we cannot go on as we are.
But this is a societal problem as much as a political one to fix, and more
police is, as Mr Kwarteng says, only a good place to start. Today, deference is something that young people are taught not to have. Indeed, we are meant to be in an age of happy “disruption”, questioning everything, from the decisions of our elders to our own gender. The two key authority figures outside the family – the police and the teacher – have become problematic, their authority stripped away. The police are seen as fair game for a good kicking, both literally and through policy reports.
This has been going on for a lot longer than 20 years, and is the result of a cultural shift that started to emerge in the Sixties and Seventies, informed by a general willingness to see the worst in figures of authority.
Consider the way the police are portrayed in popular culture. Those of us the wrong side of 50 will remember that fantastic TV drama The Sweeney. Produced in the Seventies, it depicted the notorious members of Scotland Yard’s Flying Squad. Policemen were shown as rule-bending, rule-breaking, and corrupt. Gone were the days of Dixon of Dock Green or Z Cars, in which officers were heroic figures respected by their community. And today, no police drama seems to be complete without bent officers and gratuitous violence galore.
This cultural shift has been reinforced by the fallout from the Macpherson report, which followed the murder of Stephen Lawrence. It charged the police with being institutionally racist. Even now, it hardly seems to matter what efforts are made to deal with this problem. In the eyes of many young people, the police are the enemy – the “Feds”– to be despised and avoided.
Some will claim that it is naive for a minister to call for a return to deference towards the police. They will say that we are too far gone. They are wrong. Not only can a culture of deference be actively popular, but respect for authority can be revived.
The best illustration is Hackney, in East London. In 2002, the schools in the borough were the worst in Europe, and the then government decided to suspend the Local Education Authority and give the contract to a Learning Trust. I was part of that body. We embarked on a project of transformation based on high expectations. Uniforms, routines and behavioural rituals were reimposed, along with teaching deference towards the authority of teachers.
The borough’s schools were turned into some of the best in the country. Those who sneer at the conformist culture of Hackney schools need to look at the disruptive homes that many of those children came from, where the adults had gone Awol. School is now a secure space where there are clear boundaries and there is someone in charge who you respect.
Schools may be better, but the streets of London and other areas are unsafe. The prevalence of knife crime, however, particularly within black communities, may well be changing attitudes towards the police. Amid the silly calls for more youth clubs and table tennis, community leaders know that safer streets require more and better police. In fact, for the first time I am hearing calls for more, not less, policing from communities besieged by young people out of control. When you hear leaders demanding the whole community works together to solve knife crime, this is code for: we need the police.
Of course, the Government should back the police and deference returns when there is trust within a community. But what we really need is a cultural shift, and that must come from within society itself.
Dr Tony Sewell is chair and founder of the charity Generating Genius